Being placed on hold is an unpleasant and frustrating experience for telephone callers. It is wasted time. The advent of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units and integrated call management systems by order response centers, businesses, and technical support centers often results in callers being placed on hold. The pressure on these service centers to reduce costs, typically through fewer agents available to answer calls has further exacerbated the problem. Hold times of half an hour to an hour are now fairly common.
Because most service center systems provide no indication of how long a call will be held or indicate how much longer the hold will last, callers often feel held in limbo for an indefinite time. These extended held calls require the caller to stay on the line for the duration of the hold resulting in a large phone bill. As a consequence, significant numbers of callers who are put on hold for more than a brief time period abandon their calls and hang up in resentment and frustration. The result is bad customer relations, wasted effort, and lost business for the service centers.
Furthermore, the hold state is a waste of telephone resources. It unproductively ties up the telephone of the caller as well as the telephone lines, trunks, and switching resources being used to maintain the connection between the caller and the switching system of the service center. If freed, these resources could be used productively for other calls.
To overcome some of these problems a variety of arrangements have been proposed which alert the caller that has been placed on hold to when the hold is removed. The alerting takes the form of an audible or a visual signal generated at the telephone of the caller. The alerting arrangements enable the held caller to do something else instead of having to cradle the telephone handset to his ear listening for the service center to take the call off hold. Alerting arrangements help make the time spent on hold less annoying for the held caller.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,961,142 illustrates a typical alerting device. A primary disadvantage with these alerting devices is that they require all lines from the caller to the service center to remain open. Thus, the caller must stay on the line for the duration of the call which results in significant toll costs. Furthermore, the caller is not allowed to place or receive other calls.
Other proposed arrangements include automatic call-back systems. When an incoming call is not answered by an agent of a service center within a predetermined time period (e.g., three rings), an automatic call-back system answers the call and plays a pre-recorded announcement. The announcement gives the caller the option of either having the call placed in a queue to wait for an agent to pick up, or hanging up and being called back when an agent becomes available. If the caller selects the call-back option, the system either obtains the telephone number of the caller from the telephone network by means of Automatic Number Identification (ANI), or requests the number from the caller. The caller then hangs up. When an agent becomes available, the system places a new call to the caller and connects the call to the available agent at the service center.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,436,967, 5,185,782, and 5,155,761 illustrate automatic call-back systems. A primary disadvantage with automatic call-back systems is that they leave callers wondering whether the systems will honor their place in queue and whether the service center will call back. Because the called service center is in control, the caller cannot monitor the status of the held call and cannot initiate a reconnection. Furthermore, the caller is required to divulge his call-back telephone number. Moreover, call-back systems assume that the service center is willing to pay for the call-back. Typically, service centers, especially those providing technical product support involving long detailed calls to solve customer problems, are not willing to pay for calls back to the caller. Quite to the contrary, they expect callers to pay for the call and to wait on hold for indefinitely long periods of time.